'Heavybit' Teaches Hackers How to Be Business Savvy

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'Heavybit' Teaches Hackers How to Be Business Savvy

Inside Heavybit's office in San Francisco.

Photo: Heavybit

Manufacturing companies don't always do their own manufacturing. They rely on a range of outside companies for the production of their final products, including, say, cars. There are steelmakers, rubber manufacturers, companies that build many of the components that later find their way into a car, shipping and logistics companies, and many more. This interaction between all these companies is called the supply chain.

In software, the work of building a final product has historically been done by a single company. But thanks to a growing number of cloud computing companies – as well as open source projects like MySQL and Ruby on Rails, which make it easier and faster to build web applications – a software supply chain is starting to emerge.

At least that's what Heroku co-founder James Lindenbaum thinks is going on. Heroku is an example of this type of software supply chain company. It offers an online service for building and hosting software applications – something designed to let application developers focus on writing code rather than configuring and managing servers. But there are many other companies in this category. Atlassian and GitHub sell tools for developers to collaborate and manage projects. SendGrid, New Relic, and Urban Airship sell cloud-hosted building blocks for larger applications that developers would otherwise have to build themselves from scratch.

Now, Lindenbaum has started Heavybit Industries, a kind of training ground for developers who want to build these types of supply chain companies.

Heavybit isn't trying to help companies that simply sell project management systems and developer tools – companies driven by managers looking to sell products to other managers. Based in San Francisco, it's looking to serve the new breed of supply chain company – a company built by developers, for developers. Some people have referred to this category as "business-to-developer," or B2D.

Yet Lindenbaum says B2D is a misnomer. "They're still B2B; they're still selling to a company," he says, referring to the old business-to-business acronym. "They don't sell to the developer. They sell through the developer. They have to provide value to a company in order to make money."

While developers have the technical chops to build great products – and know what their fellow developers want to see in a product – they don't always know how to build a great businesses. After Lindenbaum and his co-founders sold Heroku to Salesforce.com in 2010, they started being approached by other B2D companies asking for advice. "I got roped into being an advisor, formal and informal, for several companies," he says. "I learned that there are some common problems for this type of company."

That's why he started Heavybit, along with managing director Tom Drummond and "vibes manager" Jason Harper. "We took this three story building and converted it into a clubhouse for this community," Lindenbaum says. "We have talks, we have events, we host user groups, we have a whole structured curriculum that we use it for."

Heavybit is not unlike startup accelerators such as Y Combinator in that it offers companies office space, classes, and advising in exchange for equity. But unlike accelerators, Heavybit doesn't provide seed funding and isn't interested in early stage companies. Instead, Heavybit is focused on companies that are already funded and may even have gone through an accelerator or incubator program in the past. It will offer companies classes and advice on topics like scaling a team, market strategies, recruiting, and experience design.

Heavybit has a nine month curriculum based around these ideas. But, unlike a traditional accelerator, Heavybit will accept new companies on a rolling basis, instead of in batches like Y Combinator. Some of the companies participating so far include CircleCI, Iron.io and Kodowa. Those companies will receive mentorship from Lindenbaum and his Heroku co-founders Adam Wiggins – who left Heroku last month – and Orion Henry, as well as Cloud Foundry creator Derek Collison, Opscode founding CEO Jesse Robbins, Dropbox VP of marketing and sales Adam Gross, and many others.

There are also a number of investors advising Heavybit's companies. "There aren't that many investors who understand this kind of stuff, so we wanted to curate a group of investors who really understand this space," Lindenbaum says. They include angel investor Ron Conway, Ping Li of Accel, Ignition's Brad Silverberg, and Chris Howard.

"We just hope that they come in, stay for nine months and leave in better shape than when they came in," Lindenbaum says.